Interview With Kate Amundsen, Star Of DONNA: STRONGER THAN PRETTY

Donna: Stronger than Pretty is a new film directed by Jaret Martino which depicts a fictionalized version of his mother, Donna. The film follows Donna through several decades of her life as she grapples with her expectations for her life, as well as the expectations of others and of society. After making a socially acceptable life for herself, Donna realizes that she’s instead become trapped. She has to decide whether to risk leaving or to risk staying.

Donna is being released later this month onto all major streaming platforms. In the meantime, Film Inquiry had the opportunity to interview Kate Amundsen, who portrayed Donna.

Frances Maurer for Film Inquiry: Donna isn’t a typical movie. It follows a woman through many decades of her life and focuses closely on one arc, her individuality, and one relationship. How was playing this different from a typical role?

Kate Amundsen: I think the three decades alone was quite an unusual challenge, to keep track of that. There’s so much to cover throughout those three decades. I think we were pretty pleased with how it turned out because over the three decades you can kind of see this relationship wearing on her, which was maybe unintentional at the time.

In some scenes I wasn’t sure — how worn-down is she at this point? How much has this relationship taken a toll on her at this point? I really tried to keep track of that over the three decades. So I’d say in that way, it was very challenging. But I think ultimately we felt pretty good about it.

How did you manage performing one character not just through thirty years of her life but also through the changing society and eras of those thirty years?

That was another part that was challenging, the three decades to keep track of. I think moods and attitudes were shifting over the years. In the 80s and the 90s women were coming into the workforce more than they ever had before, into positions of leadership, and so on.

There’s that one scene where she’s going to apply for a job, and this is new for her, and it’s also generational — she had been taught that all you do is go and get a husband, and for so many years it was like that. It was a scary step in the direction of what she dreamed her life to be.

There are ups and downs in any business or working situation, and that one scene where she goes in to interview, that did happen. Women weren’t supportive of her getting a job, ironically. So I think that attitudes are always shifting, hopefully, in a good direction — I think we can see that.

By the end, she’s in a much better situation career-wise, which is great. She was surrounded by her female friends who were always supportive of her through the challenging times when jobs weren’t so easy to come by. But definitely in the 80s and the 90s, it was such a thing in films to see women at work.

One of the films I actually referenced to try to get a sense of what was going on at that time was Working Girls, in the 80s. The style, the clothes, the attitudes of women at work were such a thing.

On a little bit of a lighter note, was it fun to adopt the different styles through the decades? I noticed that your character was always wearing trendy clothes and makeup for the era, was that fun?

Yes! That was so much fun. One of the most fun things to be doing on set was the clothes. In real life, Donna was really stylish. We have such great photos of her back then with the big hair, the great outfits, the loud outfits.

I love the 80s, the bright colors, and patterns. That was really fun for me because I have a background in modeling. Our costume designer, Stephanie Lindsey, was very generous with me as far as planning out her outfits, because there were so many outfits.

And that was actually a big part of her evolution as well because we see her in the beginning as sort of modest. Then when she meets Nick and begins a relationship with him, part of the abuse is financial. She was adorned with all these amazing clothes, and that’s when she was wearing the most makeup and the biggest hair. That kind of reflects where the relationship was at that time.

When the relationship ends, we see that the clothes aren’t so loud. She has to support herself financially. Not to give away too much, but there is such an arc dress-wise and makeup-wise. We had to be careful making her a real person at the end, too — you don’t just wear one outfit once, you wear it multiple times. So we tried to keep an eye on that.

Because it spans three decades, there were so many outfits that we had to keep track of. So me and Stephanie were very involved in that way. I almost even had to make a journal of her outfits because it was so representative of where she was, psychologically.

So the clothing kind of mirrors the arc of the film?

Definitely.

That’s really interesting. I hadn’t perceived that as reflecting her own individuality and her own self-discovery.

Yes — once she’s left the relationship, spoiler alert, she’s really stripped down to the bare minimum, even psychologically. When she’s in that apartment all by herself, and she’s a single mother to three children, she’s wearing the same outfits. She doesn’t have time to do her hair and makeup anymore, and she doesn’t have the financial means either.

That was one of the more depressing days to shoot because she’s left in the rubble. She has to pick up the pieces of who she once was, and discover who that is. At that moment she’s very bare, in every sense of the word, before she picks herself up again.

Like we’ve been talking about, Donna covers a lot of time, but the movie is only a couple of hours. How did you have to work to convey the complexities and continuities of a relationship and individual that lasted so long and changed so much, but only over a couple of hours of actual time?

A lot of that was in the editing room. There’s so much you want to cover. It’s hard to encapsulate one life into two hours, and I think the reason why it was so important for Jaret to cover three decades was because that’s how long it took.

And I think in domestic violence relationships and abusive relationships, that’s how long it takes, oftentimes. It’s not an easy thing to just jump out of. There are so many things to take into consideration, and that’s why it was so important for him to show all aspects of this unfortunately very common thing. I think that’s why we wanted to cover that much time, was to hopefully honor her life in that way, and to show the cycles of domestic violence.

What was it like acting for such an intimate story based on a real person? I saw that you spoke with the actual Donna at the end of the film — were you in communication through production? Did she help with your vision for this?

I spoke mostly with Jaret and Pat, our writers. I met Donna after our first staged reading, and it was very intimidating. You always want to do their life justice.

At the end of the day, I will never 100% be Donna. I have to put my own spin on it to serve the story. So it was very intimidating, but over the years she and I got very close, and I got very close with the family. Especially shooting it, because the cast and crew actually stayed in her home while we were shooting it.

I was sleeping in her bed, which was quite a trip. I think she was staying with a friend during the shooting because for a lot of the scenes we used the house she lived in and the apartment next door. I even took steps in her dance studio where she really went to take dance lessons. Things like that were so surreal.

We, unfortunately, lost Donna this last year, which was really difficult. But I think she got to see where the film had gone. We had just had our premiere, and that was the last time I saw her. She was always so generous with me, always so kind.

I was even privy to her journals at the time, which was a trip. I know journaling was so important to her all those years, because it felt like a secret, a burden, that she couldn’t tell everyone in her life. Those journals really offered a place where she could be honest with herself.

It’s intimidating, as I said, and you just do your best. You learn as much as you can while knowing that you will never 100% be that person.

That sounds like some pretty intense almost method acting. It’s beyond shooting on-site, sleeping in her bed.

Right! I was so happy because I had never been to Long Island or that part of New York, so I was just immersing myself in that place, and it really gave me an intimate sense of her world. I loved being there, I was just on a high the whole time. Even though the subject matter is so sad and challenging at times, I was also really able to eat up the role, being here, where she was. It was a lot of fun and fulfilling for me as an actor.

If I’m not mistaken, it was Donna’s real-life children who directed and partially produced this, right?

Yes, Jaret Martino is her son, and he is a writer, producer, and director.

You’ve told me about how close you were to her physical home. How was it for her children to tell you how to act, how they saw her? How was that different than a typical experience?

Again, it was intimidating. The director is writing a story about his mom and you’re portraying his mom, which is such an important relationship to him. You can see in the writing how much he adores his mom, and how much she did for him.

I can only hope to do my best in that role, but me and Jaret had known each other for a few years at that point, we had made a short film together, and I think we had really developed a sense of trust. So by the time that we were shooting, it felt like we knew what we were doing. We had an idea for how we wanted her to be, and I think the main thing we decided on was that we wanted her to be a hero. We wanted to portray her in this way, because she was, and she is, so that was our goal.

We see some pretty awful things happening to Donna in this film, I think primarily we see her strength through it, and there are people who are awful to her, but she also has a support network of people who take care of her when she’s at her lowest. I want to ask if you think this is a hopeful film? What’s the message you want to send to communities or people who might be in situations like this?

That’s definitely the message I want to send — hope. I think that’s one of the most important things that any human can have in life. We’re all going to experience challenging things at one time or another and that’s all you can hope for, to have some hope. That’s what I would want.

Because these things just go on for so many years, and it’s so complicated and challenging for women and men to know that there is a life outside of abuse. The reason why it can last so long is because leaving is so dangerous. The most dangerous part of an abusive relationship is the leaving.

There are resources out there, and this film has sent its message to women — there are a lot of women who have approached us and said “I know this story.” One in three people have some sort of relationship to domestic violence, whether they know someone, they’ve experienced it, or they are the abuser. So that’s the message I really want to send, and I know Jaret wants to send, that there’s hope.

Film Inquiry thanks Kate Amundsen for her time.

Donna is partnered with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which has resources to support survivors and educate anyone who would like to learn more. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE), and there is a list of specialized hotlines here.

Donna will premiere on all major streaming platforms February 23, 2021.

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Watch Donna: Stranger Than Pretty